l'équipement

At a little after 7am, with the bike locked, I begin the ritual of settling in for practice. The bike commute is something I've only been doing since late April. The guitar practice is something that I've been doing for three years, and the steps are fast and automatic. I've been trying to do it the same way every time, since there are a lot of pieces to manage and I want to maximize my practice time.

First I pull two little cinch sacks out of my pannier. The first bag came with my dorky-looking full-sized headphones. It contains the headphones, a single AAA battery, and two Flents Quiet Please earplugs. The earplugs go in first, with the headphones over the top of them. This is how I had to deal with the extroardinary amount of ambient noise in the cabin of the bus: revving engine, whooshing air outside the cabin, conversation, A/V equipment on days when the television is being used, the constant whine of tires rolling down the interstate. The earplugs deaden most of this, leaving the sound comming from the headphones themselves.

The second bag is a hand-me-down Brooks sack that Syd gave me. It contains a guitar chord (about two cubits in length), a portable practice amp with 3 out of the 4 AAA batteries that it needs to operate, a couple of Dunlop 3.0mm Big Stubby guitar picks, some spare batteries, and a few random things that I would need to conduct string changes, trim fingernails, etc.

The practice amp is a Korg Pandora PX4, which I store with only 3 out of 4 batteries. I do this because the power switch, if jostled in the bag during transport, always seems to activate and drain the juice. (Grrrr.) This little amp can make a big variety of sounds, a few of which I find acceptable for day-to-day practice. It also has a built-in tuner and a few built-in drum loops which are occasionally fun to improvise over. Most of the time I use the acoustic guitar simulator.

Once assembled, I plug in the Traveler Speedster. This is an affordable guitar, designed to be very portable. Much of the body of a regular electric guitar is absent, with the part that your right arm would rest on being detachable with a thumb screw. The head is also absent, and the tuning pegs are hidden in the body near the the pickup. The fretboard is full sized, with the same 24.75" scale length you would find on a Gibson Les Paul.

Mine came with a single-coil pickup, which I replaced within the first week of riding. Ever used a drill or a hairdryer near an AM radio? That's what it sounded like. The alternator on the bus, an electrical generator used to power the A/V equipment, and the air conditioner all conspired to fill the air with awful electrical noise, all of which the single-coil pickup brought faithfully to my ears. I replaced it with a humbucker right away, which solved that problem beautifully. Speedsters come with a humbucker now.

With headphones on and guitar in hand, all that is left to do is tune & play. I'm pretty sure that nobody around me can hear much of anything. Any acoustic energy given off by string vibration is overwhelmed by road noise. This means I can engage in tireless scale & arpeggio exercises without making someone want to throttle me.